


[Meta] Episode 5.07 ("Ina Paha")

by wanderlustlover



Series: Hawaii Five-0 Season Five Meta [2]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-27 01:45:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2674271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meta from the 100th Episode, as requested.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I: Thoughts on SEAL!Steve who doesn’t know how to give up, who keeps fighting through it all, who figures out how to get out of his own personal hell despite the fact he’s drugged to shit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alemara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alemara/gifts), [SabbyBrina84](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SabbyBrina84/gifts).



>  

So, this is the part I was expecting and not disappointed in (as far as Steve goes). Steve the SEAL is a brickshit house of crazy and ability to endure. He’d have to be. It’s what he was trained for. That’s what Coronado is ABOUT. It’s not basic. It’s pushing a man until he either breaks or does not break. It’s why 180 people go in and 30 come out.

It’s why when they say Steve is the best in his class of graduates, and the best of the best in his field, this is EPIC statement (of survival, of endurance, of ability, and of insanity). 

Also. Remember we have proof he spent twelve years before this event living through events like this all the time.

(Try to remember how the SEALs, and Joe, in 2.10 are not in the slightest surprised about the condition North Korea!Steve is found in. Try to remember how the whole of his events with Freddie in the past and Catherine in the present 3.20 are all of two days on two missions. 

Remember, with chilling clarity, how normal it was to every single military person in 4.22 to not surprised or offended at the simple facts Steve was abandoned, captured, tortured, on camera and nearly killed by terrorists who had his picture from things he did earlier in his career as a SEAL. 

The absolutely remoteless way he leads military teams in 1.01, 2.23, and 3.01. Or how in 2.01 Joe is not surprised Steve broke out jail from an ambulance, while shanked and bleeding to death and is on the run, because quote “he trained him to be a crazy capable bastard.” The absolute ruthlessness (and guilt but compartmentalization) he can take down one of his own or leave behind one of his own, if he has to, in 1.09 and 2.23. 

Try to massively extrapolate from there: this is normal. 

This. Is. Normal. Twelve years of absolutely normal to a SEAL.

This is the shit they were trained to survive/fight/thrive through.) 

So. Yeah. This made me deliriously happy.

The logic of the timeline in the chair and the white/photo room is really broken, because of just how many times they gassed him, iv’d him and shot him with things to make him pass out instantly, yet never showed him out cold long and made him look incredibly easy to wake up each time he was needed for more torture.

For any of that to make sense this would have needed to be 3-4 days.

At least. (Which is where my personal universe will keep it.

Especially if you want me to believe he’s breaking at the end.) 

I don’t live for torture scenes, but I thought they were well done. Especially to leave him drugged, disoriented, with absolutely no sense of time, day or night (because if you look at the windows in the chair scenes the light never gets dim or slants). I like that Steve continues to fight back, and fails when he fails, and win when he wins. 

I think it was super right for being a SEAL (and holy fucking creepy in the right way) that to survive he killed a woman, basically impaled her body into being a sitting doll and used it as a shield to get the upper hand on surprising Wo Fat. It’s so so so so wrong, and yet, if your only mental imperative trained deeper than breathing is TO SURVIVE, of course you would do this. 

The ending fight is brutal, and I go back and forth, along with Laura, on the whether anyone could really take a fire extinguisher to the head and keep going. But the other 98% of the fight is perfect. It’s no holds barred fight for survival against a crazy obsessed bastard who has been systematically taking apart Steve, Steve’s family, and now Steve’s head for four years. It’s all about survival and ending this. It has no safety’s on. 

(Thought lets not start in on the whole “behavioral engineer” thing, okay? Because that was badly done. It would have taken weeks or months to make that threat anything like realistically happening. Even as a threat, to a known SEAL, with his background, it’s cheap and entirely like pulling pigtails instead of being a crazy villain bastard.) 

I like just how entirely fucked up Steve has to be by the end, both to fire and be fired at from less than three or four feet apart. The fact he is entirely screwed up about which reality is the real reality when he’s surrounded by people he only seems to half recognize at all, and that he’s entirely torn up by the fact his father, whom he saw only a minute ago (and had been giving him the recognition he’s wanted his whole life finally), has been gone for four years. 

I think that was all amazingly well done.


	2. Thoughts on Steve's hallucinogenic mind trip

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Where to even start with this one. 

From the beginning Lenkov told us this would be what happened if everyone wasn’t broken, and in my head I’ve been referring to this as what would have happened if everyone wasn’t from the land of misfit toys. 

**The Toys of the The Land of Not-So-Misfit Toys**

The Core: Steve’s mind takes where they were at the beginning when everyone needed everyone so much they couldn’t so no, and got lucky that this ever worked out, that they all ever needed each other, that they all found a family, a life, a good job in each other and removes the “need” for it.

Danny Williams, never fell apart; is happily married, happily in Hawaii, happily raising his daughter, and happily a respect cop. Chin Ho Kelly was never a scandal; is a police captain, respected by all and happily married. Kono Kalakaua never blew her knee; and is a four time world champion. 

The Outskirts: Jenna’s fiance is alive (because, of course, he is. Steve & she were peas in a pod over that and his dad and their bond and similar desperation over Wo Fat, which is something Steve will never hold over Jenna. It’s why he’s hurt more than angry at her original betrayal. Because he would have done everything the same even if he’d known from the beginning). She’s the broken toy who dies still broken. The person he let down. And of course she gets her fiance, if he gets his father. 

**But But But What About The Other Toys/People:**

I keep seeing people talk a lot about the people didn’t Steve give happily ever after’s to or who didn’t appear, so let me try to take this subject in a way that does talk about several actors who probably will never return to the show, or weren’t available, or plain weren’t ask because they weren’t part of the point, or who the showrunner didn’t think we should need.

Grover & Jerry are in it because they are main cast and they are floating around in Steve’s head, even if they aren’t needed the same way. Grover on vacation since he shouldn’t be living there yet. Jerry living on the street crazy (….for reasons I don’t want to get into, because I still feel like this show is using Jerry mostly for someone to scapegoat, pity and adopt like there’s something deeply wrong with him).

But what about Lori, and Max, and Fong, and Catherine, and on and on they cry? I guess Steve didn’t care about them at all. BUT. And this is all my opinion. But look at all those people. No, seriously. Take a moment remember where they started. This group of people? They weren’t broken when they came in. They were not in shambles. They did not NEED Steve to fix them and save them. 

But Freddie should have been there because he’s Steve only PTSD trigger someone said (and I’m trying hard not to hit the wrongness of that PTSD misunderstanding with a sledgehammer, no one, with Steve’s life, has PTSD only for one moment in twelve years because it was the last one). But. Freddie. Freddie.

Freddie (to me) is deadly important. Because he’s very much so Not a Misfit Toy. Yes, he’s dead. Yes, he died a horrible, bloody, abandoned death. Yes, he was Steve’s best friend/brother person. But he’s not a Misfit Toy. He is a SEAL. He made his bed. He chose his life. He was trained for it. He lived it. He died protecting the world, the way he knew he could in this life and chose to embrace it anyway, from terrorist scum.

In my opinion, there is no part of Steve’s mind that wold ever dare sully the choice and sacrifice of another SEAL, especially his brother, just doing his job.

**Steve McGarrett’s Superhero**

Oh, God. You know there’s no way to write about this without talking about Steve’s opinion of Danny, right? There is nothing this crazy world highlights more than Steve’s opinion of Danny.

Because we see exactly what Danny is in Steve’s eyes. 

He’s the guy who deserves the world. He’s the guy who could save Steve’s dad. He’s the guy who could make Victor talk. He’s the guy who could figure out where Wo Fat is. He’s the guy who does, and does, and does, and more than anyone Steve knows, always make the Right Choice, is entirely Good, and who deserves everything that would make him happy, happier than the word happy can contain, the way that life before should have never seen him as anything less than what Steve sees in him every single day. 

He’s everything Steve envies and respect sand looks up, wants to be and knows he can never attain being because of what his life is and the choices he’s made of it and the things those choices have made of him. And Danny as Steve’s Hero of This Tale is capable of everything, which makes his AU character disjointed and inconsistant, too big and too broad and too many traits in every crazy direction, the way all perfect child-heroes are disjointed from reality and consistency.

**The Most Misfit Toy of the Them All**

I think it’s very important to look at once angle I haven’t seen anyone talk about and that’s Steve.

Read up and remember how many things Steve fixed for everyone and try to list for me how many things changed in his life. Go on. Think about it. Because Steve doesn’t save his dad. He gets to have him, but he doesn’t save him. He doesn’t save his mom. His sister is not there. His ‘brother’ is still just dead. He’s still been in the service, adrift and apart for twelve years (and away home for 18).

Steve takes from himself the entire family and support system he’s grown with for four and half years, makes them devoid of needing him without making himself devoid of needing them and gives himself exactly three things, and they are the three things that he still doesn’t give himself easily, the way he gives everything to the others. 

1\. John McGarrett is alive. But they still have the exactly same relationship.

2\. Wo Fat is killed. Of course, he is. Danny gets through to Victor, who gets them to Wo Fat. Who does even up dead. But Steve ends up shouting at the sky over his body, not understanding anything, because his subconscious still has no answers. 

3\. Is the one thing I believe Steve actually wanted most and killed him most on the scene that happened after — Steve got told by his father it was good he was home.

Steve gave himself a glimmer of John’s finally accepting him, missing him, wanting him. To his face. Apologetic, and stoic, and emabressed and a little ashamed and awkward, but so there. On his father’s face. So there and so his. Not behind his back to everyone but him, who would tell him about his father caring only long after his brain when blown on the living room walls when Steve’s life (tracking of an international terrorist & John’s investigation & Doris’s multiple betrayals) led to his death. But right to Steve’s face. from John. 

Which is the only thing Steve has really wanted since he was sixteen, and I would argue that he wants so much more than he wants John alive. Because that man died with Doris in the car crash no matter that he was still alive in the world somewhere far away for the next two decade, as gone as though he were dead.

(And that more than anything else KILLED ME on Steve’s behalf.)


	3. Thoughts on the Steve who's locked in a box, and crying as he's being drugged

I don’t get to rewatch the episode for a fifth time, to write this while watching it (so I could be like 50% all wrong), because I’m not near my home computer currently while writing this, but I don’t believe Steve was crying while he was being tortured while in the box or the chair. I do remember him tearing up from the gas, but I don’t really remember him crying in the chair or crying at all until Danny’s words about his Dad being dead.

Though, honestly, if I am wrong, if you or me or even Steve were pumped full of three different kinds of drugs, over and over and OVER and OVER, and tortured while on every single one in different ways each time, so your body and mind couldn’t adjust and numb it out, and you can’t even control your own mind, there’s absolutely no reason you wouldn’t be losing control of your own body, too.

(It’s why I feel relieved and pleased that Steve’s next move after shooting Wo Fat is that he passes the hell out, right there, on the ground, soaked in water and blood and gun powder and drugs, in the exact same spot he was in. Because his body is spent and he just forced it through two fights he’s only capable of because of his training, and his body wins this round now that he’s alive and not in danger, now that survival is not the only acceptable imperative.)

The box, on the other hand.

Oh. Oh, God. The box. That was brilliantly done.

The box is a contained deprivation room. When he wakes up he’s in a room devoid of any color but white. There’s no windows to show him an observer or tell time, no light but blinding white. There’s no break in the walls to show a door to give him a hint of how he got in or is taken out. He can’t hear anything through the walls, and he’s given the interpretation that no one can hear him as he’s yelling and beating on the walls (though he knows he’s being trapped, tortured and watched). There are no weaknesses in the structural integrity. There’s no furniture.

It’s just the white empty room and him.

Then it becomes even worse. A whole wall turns into a movie screen (while panels open fluidly just enough to show us the camera), and there is nothing but him, that intensely empty, void of distraction space and himself. Being accosted with his childhood memories. Both the best and the worst. In rotating turns.Very loudly, while even the lights dim. Reminding him that his life was perfect and then it just fell apart as a series of ever growing, ever being uncovered, lies. That. Never. Stop. Coming. And. Getting. Worse. 

Then, when he reacts in any fashion to them (beating the walls, threatening, yelling he has not clue why or what is happening), he’s suddenly doused with noxious gas, he can’t escape or block out, that constantly strangles him until he’s slammed into sudden unconsciousness (and the next round in the chair).

This box is brilliant because of its utter simplicity.

The way it refuses to let the mind or the body create any safe space from what is put in front of it. The mind will always turn to chaos and distraction over emptiness. It is the greatest machine out there, and a SEAL, especially, is attuned to notice and catalog everything. Steve has no choice but to look, on an instinctual and professional and emotional level, and the room won’t let him avoid it as the only creation of color, movement, sound in there.


	4. And last but definitely not least: Thoughts on Steve who's broken at the end

Oh. How do I even words this one.

Steve is so broken at the end of this.So. So. So. Broken.

Steve, who gave all of the people he loves most the things he wishes he could give them and never can (lives back, betrayals never happened, loved ones were never lost; joy and love and happiness, peace, the need to never worry, doubt, to feels always perfectly safe, loved, wanted), and he gave himself the one thing he’d never admit he has always wanted and will never stop wanting (his father’s pride/approval/apology).

He believed, and it would be a thing that made him, in his eyes, weak.  
Because anything less than clear eyed honesty, than the absolute truth, is.

On top of that it’s not only that. It’s the fact that, at least, his father is dead to not ever be the things his father would never be alive (because he hadn’t during the eighteen years he had been alive.) But. Doris is. Alive. And Doris was in his life for a year.

And. Doris. Chose. Wo Fat. To. Protect. Over. Steve.

And it nearly ended up with him dead, dead, dead, DEAD. Again.

Over — lets be straight about this — the stupidest lie/plot reveal. Ever.

Who would evade both of their kids for a full years over the fact they did a good deed out of a mission/op gone wrong? (Who wouldn’t think their SON/a SEAL, who has been doing the exact same kind of work, and so much worse, for the last decade and half wouldn’t have at least a glimmer of understanding for this?)

Because. I’m sorry. You made your bed and you have to sleep in it. The ONLY THING Steve will get from that is that Doris chose protecting Wo Fat, a guy who was all over the world doing horrific things, and her good deed, nearly forty years ago, over believing HER CHILDREN would understand her not abandoning a suddenly lacking-a-mother helpless baby. That the organization made her give up, not herself. That this secret was always worth more than their lives, both figuratively and literally.

And instead had her daughter is kidnapped and shoved in a trunk for just having The Champ Box, and ended up with her son first hanging from a ceiling in Korea, being tortured and cattle prodded, watching a team mate be manipulated and them killed in front of him. And then it ended up with him in a chair, in a room, being pumped full of drugs, tortured over and over, and all but getting shot in the head point blank.

Because Doris chose to protect Wo Fat in this all.

I cannot stress how bad this plot reveal is on that level.

The only thing it does is make Wo Fat look insane and Doris look Even Worse.

But Steve is broken and having to hold the shards of both of these things at once, just being startled into awareness again. His father, who is dead, who NEVER approved of him and his mother, who is not dead, who NEVER chose him and would let him die. Aware he can NEVER give back to the people he loves/respect most in the world what they deserve/he owes them.

While he’s on jacked up amounts of three different types of drugs, been tortured for god knows how long, pushed his body to its limits just to survive, shot at someone from three-to-four feet expecting it would kill him (because at 3-4 feet there is not other eventuality you think is coming).

Broken is the only thing Steve could be at this point.


	5. Any thoughts on Steve's breakdown/the team's reaction to it in the 100th episode? Alternatively, how do you think the next meeting with him and Doris is going to turn out?

So, I just covered Steve’s breakdown in the last one, I’ll cover the other side of your first question: the team’s reaction to it. This is the first place your heart breaks in that scene, because Steve doesn’t know until Danny’s tells him, but the team knows instantly. How bad this all is. The very second Steve asks for his Dad.

Danny’s face falls, helplessly. The muscle in Chin’s jaw tightens, suddenly. And Kono crouches down on her feet, near Steve’s leg. Because this is the man that saved them all, and everyone knows how important John McGarrett is. How it might be the case that has jeopardized/compromised Steve most, but also the case that is the reason Five-0 even came into being. The reason for their very name.

Which never stops being: just how important Steve’s Dad is to him.

No one wants to tell him, wants to break his heart, and take his father from him, again. But they know it has to be done, and Danny does it. Because he’s Danny. And it’s Steve. It’s what they do. They hold on and tell each other the truth, they stand at each others side, no matter how bad, how far, how deep that hole goes.

And Steve says he’s fine, only to break.From fine to a sob. 

And as Laura put so well, Kono’s face in that is the face of fandom.

We may joke about wanting to see what Steve would look like in this condition (or hint at it fics and graphics), but seeing it is like seeing the sun turn black and go out. It’s cool to talk about, but your heart actually freezes over and dies to see it. It’s wrong. So wrong. Like snow on the equator. Rain falling up. Without ever having to be more than human — this is their hero, their superhero, superhuman, SEAL boss, the man they all look up to, respect, want to impress, owe so much to, who bucks the rules and always protects his own, always completes the mission.

Who won. Who killed Wo Fat.

But who is just as beaten in so many different ways all at once.

~*~

The other question just hurts my heart and my soul so much.

If you know Steve, you’ll know why I just want Laura, specifically, to come hold my hand about this one. Because this is the worst question on the face of the planet. This is question every orphan and every abandoned child and every child who lost a parent way too early would lose.

This is the reasons Season Three was Season Three, and vaguely plausible.

I think that this would be an incredibly bad scene. Imagine Danny’s angry snippiness when Doris first appear and he was offended on behalf that Steve couldn’t be (offended) that Doris dared still be alive after having ruined all these people’s lives and made Steve into this combination walk machine-stuck-in-a-state-of-shock and a child-stuck-in-one-of-desperate-relief-and-possession. I think you’d get that from Danny first. Again. And much louder/aggressive from him.

I think we’d get a lot more of that last fight of Steve being mad.

But the problem with Steve’s ‘anything’ where it comes to his parents is that at the core of it — like all children of this situation — it’ll always come down to the question of self, and the want for that parent to love you, see you, find worth in you.

I just don’t want Doris to ever exist again in the show. I really don’t want her around to jerk Steve around like was all she did in her season (laughing at his wanting to know the truth, dragging his oldest friend into lying to him, crying-and-yell-at-once at the drop of a hat because no could possibly understand).

Because Steve will be angry at the triviality of the lie, and the twistedness of the situation, but before even a month is up Steve won’t care at all that he was tortured and nearly died (I’d argue he really stops caring about that by the third or fourth time he wakes up in hospital, almost dying but not being dead yet, and that being a triumph, is a SEAL skill trained in like breathing, and it is absolutely normal).

But Doris. Doris is his mom. His mom. From his perfect childhood. From that moment with the knocking on the door, and his family just falling apart. And no matter how many secrets the demons and devils drag out, she’ll always be his Mother. And it will always twist him up impossibly, and I doubt he’d ever be capable of just kicking her out of his life.


End file.
